The MSI Mega View 566 is a multimedia player in a convenient size with rudimentary music features, decent video, and acceptable photo storage. It offers good audio recording and functional video recording.

After our lukewarm review of the Mega View 561 personal multimedia player, MSI asked us to take a look at the Mega View 566 ($399 direct), which uses the same body and screen, but has some new functions and updates in its operating software.

The 566 adds an SD slot on the back edge of the top, a convenience if your digital camera uses that format. The controls remain simple, easily accessible by your right thumb, and the size and "grippiness" are just right for a multimedia player. The weight remains unchanged, at 9 ounces. It appears as a USB 2.0 mass-storage device to your system, so file transfers to and from the Music, Video, Photo, and SD-MMC folders are simple.

We transferred our standard test tones, music, photo, and video files to the Mega View 566 and started testing. Like the 561, the 566 had plenty of volume and sounded decent. We noted a bit less low end on the 566. When we kicked in the EQ presets, however, we encountered huge amounts of distortion, as we had on the iriver H10. Given the ear's tolerance for harmonic distortion, you might not even be aware of it, but it's there in quantity. It appears to us that the decoder chip adds harmonics to the frequencies it's trying to boost, rather than altering the fundamental frequencies. The harmonics can trick the ear into thinking it's hearing more treble or more bass, because the frequencies are related harmonically to the fundamental. But the harmonics begin to collide with one another, creating "wolf tones" not present in the source material. Sibilants in vocals pick up an unpleasant whistling ring, bass gets muddy, and some presets sound like you've stuffed cotton in your ears. We're finding other players that use this technique, and we don't like it.

Audio-recording quality remains a strong point of this device. You can select from three quality levels, and the top level is good enough for serious field recording with an external microphone. The Mega View 566 lacks the user-settable audio level controls of the Archos PMA430, but it does a fine job with music and vocals.

The user interface may have been tweaked since the 561, but we couldn't find any changes that we'd say were improvements. The player does not index the music by artist, genre, or song; it just sorts them within each folder. Fortunately, it preserves the order of the songs within the folders. It will play songs from folders randomly if you desire. The only song information displayed on the screen during playback is the title and length.

Although we no longer had the 561 for direct comparison, the screen on the 566 seemed brighter. It rendered shadow details better in movies and digital images, but the vertical viewing angle is rather narrow and you must position the tilt of the player carefully to see the image clearly.

Although the screen is 320-by-240 and 3.5 inches diagonally, the pixels are small, with clearly visible lines separating them. The coarseness of the display detracts from still or moving images, and skin tones are too redeveryone looks sunburned. The 566 does not pan and zoom images. This is a valuable feature for photo enthusiasts, and is found on both the Archos and Epson viewers.

We had hoped for improvements in the Mega View 566, but beyond the addition of the SD slot, we couldn't find any.

Bill Machrone is vice president of technology at Ziff Davis Publishing and editorial director of the Interactive Media and Development Group. He joined Ziff Davis in May 1983 as technical editor of PC Magazine, became...

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